UDM Libraries Book of the Weekhttp://botw.commons.udmercy.edu
Mon, 14 Aug 2017 12:50:40 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=3.7.1Krazy: George Herriman, a Life in Black and Whitehttp://botw.commons.udmercy.edu/2017/08/14/krazy-george-herriman-a-life-in-black-and-white/
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by Michael Tisserand

An Amazon Best Book of December 2016:Krazy: A Life in Black and White is the exhaustively researched and fascinating story of a trailblazer with a secret. Nicknamed “The Greek” by a fellow cartoonist, owing to his swarthy complexion and curly hair (which he typically kept hidden under a fedora), it wasn’t until George Herriman, creator of the perpetually lovestruck Krazy Kat, had been dead for twenty-seven years that a would-be biographer discovered the secret Herriman had guarded all his life. He was the product of a mixed-race marriage, and had, like two generations of Herrimans before him, been able to “pass for white.” The creator of a comic strip that has been infinitely more influential among cartoonists and intellectuals than it was popular with the American public (the strips only appeared in newspapers for twenty years because newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst was such a fan he gave Herriman a lifetime contract; a visitor to Herriman’s editor found an office junior sopping up a water leak with original Krazy Kat art), this new biography finally gives Herriman his due and frames him as a visionary whose influence helped shape popular culture for decades after his death. It takes a fresh and knowing look at the cheerfully subversive cartoons involving the put-upon but loving black cat and his white, brick-throwing love/nemesis. In addition, Tisserand provides eye-opening dimension with regard to the scale of Herriman’s influence: Michael Chabon, Will Eisner, Charles Schulz, ee cummings and many others credit him with inspiring their work (you may never look at the zigzag on Charlie Brown’s t-shirt again without remembering that it was Charles Schulz’s tribute to the Navaho designs that recurred in Herriman’s work). Ultimately, the reader comes away with a sobering idea of what an exhausting job it must have been for a gentle genius, living on the color line in the first half of twentieth century America, pursuing a career and a point of view that never would have been open to him had his true racial identity been known. —Vannessa Cronin, The Amazon Book Review

by Daniel J. Levitin

We are bombarded with more information each day than our brains can process—especially in election season. It’s raining bad data, half-truths, and even outright lies. New York Times bestselling author Daniel J. Levitin shows how to recognize misleading announcements, statistics, graphs, and written reports revealing the ways lying weasels can use them.

It’s becoming harder to separate the wheat from the digital chaff. How do we distinguish misinformation, pseudo-facts, distortions, and outright lies from reliable information? Levitin groups his field guide into two categories—statistical information and faulty arguments—ultimately showing how science is the bedrock of critical thinking. Infoliteracy means understanding that there are hierarchies of source quality and bias that variously distort our information feeds via every media channel, including social media. We may expect newspapers, bloggers, the government, and Wikipedia to be factually and logically correct, but they so often aren’t. We need to think critically about the words and numbers we encounter if we want to be successful at work, at play, and in making the most of our lives. This means checking the plausibility and reasoning—not passively accepting information, repeating it, and making decisions based on it. Readers learn to avoid the extremes of passive gullibility and cynical rejection. Levitin’s charming, entertaining, accessible guide can help anyone wake up to a whole lot of things that aren’t so. And catch some lying weasels in their tracks!

Relive the adventure and magic in one of the most beloved motion pictures of all-time,E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, from Academy Award-winning director Steven Spielberg. Captivating audiences of all ages, this timeless story follows the unforgettable journey of a lost alien and the 10-year-old boy he befriends. Join Elliot (Henry Thomas), Gertie (Drew Barrymore) and Michael (Robert MacNaughton) as they come together to help E.T. find his way back home.E.T. The Extra-Terrestrialis “one of the great American films” (Leonard Maltin) that forever belongs in the hearts and minds of audiences everywhere.

Winner of 6 Academy Awards® including Best Director for writer/director Damien Chazelle, and winner of a record-breaking 7 Golden Globe® Awards, LA LA LAND is more than the most acclaimed movie of the year – it’s a cinematic treasure for the ages that you’ll fall in love with again and again. Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling star as Mia and Sebastian, an actress and a jazz musician pursuing their Hollywood dreams – and finding each other – in a vibrant celebration of hope, dreams, and love.

Report evaluates strategies for dealing with U.S. partners and adversaries in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East in a time of diminishing defense budgets and an American public preference for a domestic focus.

CHAPTER ONE. Introduction; CHAPTER TWO. The Partnership Setting; The Historical Importance of U.S. Partnerships; Global Trends Affecting U.S. Partnerships; Partnerships Increasingly Require U.S. Political Flexibility; Alternative U.S. Approaches to Partnership Engagement; CHAPTER THREE. Anatomy of the Potential Adversaries; China; Russia; North Korea; Iran; Salafi Jihadists; Cooperation Among Potential Adversaries; These Adversaries Create Vulnerable Partners; Back to Bipolarity?
Formidable Adversaries Make U.S. Retrenchment Difficult on Its Partners A Strategy for Dealing with Potential Adversaries; CHAPTER FOUR. U.S. Constraints Limit Assertiveness; U.S. Attitudes Toward Global Responsibility; Shifting Global Defense Spending; Is the United States Overextended?; U.S. Power to Coerce; U.S. Energy Exports to Partners; The Impact of Budgetary Constraints and Public Attitude; CHAPTER FIVE. European Partners and the “Free Rider” Problem; Paradigm Lost; Vulnerable Partners; Declining Capabilities and Will in Europe
Three Pivotal Partners: The United Kingdom, Germany, and Turkey Can Venus Become Mars?; Assessing the Historical “Free Rider” Problem; Transatlantic Trade and Security; Europe in North Africa, the Middle East, and Asia; A Regional Strategy for Europe; CHAPTER SIX. Asian Partners and Inadequate Security Structures; The U.S. Pivot to Asia; Strategic Dangers in Asia; Areas of Tension and Vulnerable Nations; Asia’s Security Architecture Is Underdeveloped; Two Pivotal Partners: Japan and India; The Trans-Pacific Partnership; Military Options for Dealing with China
Potential Strategies for Managing China A Regional Strategy for Asia; CHAPTER SEVEN. In Search of a Middle East Partnership Strategy; The Middle East Today; Vulnerable American Partners; Layers of Chaos and Contradiction; Pivotal Partners: Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan; Russia Joins the Fray; Alternatives for a New Middle East Strategy; CHAPTER EIGHT. Conclusion: Choosing an Approach; Abbreviations; References

by Diane P. Koenker

The Bolsheviks took power in Russia 1917 armed with an ideology centered on the power of the worker. From the beginning, however, Soviet leaders also realized the need for rest and leisure within the new proletarian society and over subsequent decades struggled to reconcile the concept of leisure with the doctrine of communism, addressing such fundamental concerns as what the purpose of leisure should be in a workers’ state and how socialist vacations should differ from those enjoyed by the capitalist bourgeoisie.

In Club Red, Diane P. Koenker offers a sweeping and insightful history of Soviet vacationing and tourism from the Revolution through perestroika. She shows that from the outset, the regime insisted that the value of tourism and vacation time was strictly utilitarian. Throughout the 1920s and ’30s, the emphasis was on providing the workers access to the “repair shops” of the nation’s sanatoria or to the invigorating journeys by foot, bicycle, skis, or horseback that were the stuff of “proletarian tourism.” Both the sedentary vacation and tourism were part of the regime’s effort to transform the poor and often illiterate citizenry into new Soviet men and women.

Koenker emphasizes a distinctive blend of purpose and pleasure in Soviet vacation policy and practice and explores a fundamental paradox: a state committed to the idea of the collective found itself promoting a vacation policy that increasingly encouraged and then had to respond to individual autonomy and selfhood. The history of Soviet tourism and vacations tells a story of freely chosen mobility that was enabled and subsidized by the state. While Koenker focuses primarily on Soviet domestic vacation travel, she also notes the decisive impact of travel abroad (mostly to other socialist countries), which shaped new worldviews, created new consumer desires, and transformed Soviet vacation practices.

by Aldo J. Regalado

“Faster than a speeding bullet. More powerful than a locomotive. Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound . . . It’s Superman!” Bending Steel examines the historical origins and cultural significance of Superman and his fellow American crusaders. Cultural historian Aldo J. Regalado asserts that the superhero seems a direct response to modernity, often fighting the interrelated processes of industrialization, urbanization, immigration, and capitalism that transformed the United States from the early nineteenth century to the present. Reeling from these exciting but rapid and destabilizing forces, Americans turned to heroic fiction as a means of explaining national and personal identities to themselves and to the world. In so doing, they created characters and stories that sometimes affirmed, but other times subverted conventional notions of race, class, gender, and nationalism.

The cultural conversation articulated through the nation’s early heroic fiction eventually led to a new heroic type―the brightly clad, super-powered, pro-social action heroes that first appeared in American comic books starting in the late 1930s. Although indelibly shaped by the Great Depression and World War II sensibilities of the second-generation immigrants most responsible for their creation, comic book superheroes remain a mainstay of American popular culture.

Tracing superhero fiction all the way back to the nineteenth century, Regalado firmly bases his analysis of dime novels, pulp fiction, and comics in historical, biographical, and reader response sources. He explores the roles played by creators, producers, and consumers in crafting superhero fiction, ultimately concluding that these narratives are essential for understanding vital trajectories in American culture.

]]>http://botw.commons.udmercy.edu/2017/07/03/bending-steel-modernity-and-the-american-superhero/feed/0#Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media (EBOOK)http://botw.commons.udmercy.edu/2017/06/26/republic-divided-democracy-in-the-age-of-social-media-ebook/
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by Cass R. Sunstein

As the Internet grows more sophisticated, it is creating new threats to democracy. Social media companies such as Facebook can sort us ever more efficiently into groups of the like-minded, creating echo chambers that amplify our views. It’s no accident that on some occasions, people of different political views cannot even understand each other. It’s also no surprise that terrorist groups have been able to exploit social media to deadly effect.

Welcome to the age of #Republic.

In this revealing book, Cass Sunstein, the New York Times bestselling author of Nudge and The World According to Star Wars, shows how today’s Internet is driving political fragmentation, polarization, and even extremism–and what can be done about it.

Thoroughly rethinking the critical relationship between democracy and the Internet, Sunstein describes how the online world creates “cybercascades,” exploits “confirmation bias,” and assists “polarization entrepreneurs.” And he explains why online fragmentation endangers the shared conversations, experiences, and understandings that are the lifeblood of democracy.

In response, Sunstein proposes practical and legal changes to make the Internet friendlier to democratic deliberation. These changes would get us out of our information cocoons by increasing the frequency of unchosen, unplanned encounters and exposing us to people, places, things, and ideas that we would never have picked for our Twitter feed.

#Republic need not be an ironic term. As Sunstein shows, it can be a rallying cry for the kind of democracy that citizens of diverse societies most need.

The internationally acclaimed architect’s grounds of his Hamptons estate on Long Island, New York—a lush garden oasis masterfully transformed over the course of two decades.

Peter Marino’s quintessentially American landscape is a combination of organizational rigor and a joyful informality in the use of plant materials. The gardens feature carefully curated plants, trees, and flowers on twelve acres including a “color wheel” of purple, pink, red, and yellow gardens, evergreen trees, an apple orchard, a formal rose garden, and nearly forty works of art by François-Xavier and Claude Lalanne. Seasonal floral highlights include the colorful blooms of azaleas in the late spring, roses in June, and hydrangeas in the summer.

This book shows the landscape in different seasons and moods, captured in both a laid-back grandeur— sunny vistas, moonlit moments, the beauty of natural elements and sublime works of art—and in a moody atmosphere, when the dramatic light after a summer storm imbues the garden with a romantic haze. The garden is presented as a picturesque example of a first-rate contemporary landscape and as a dreamlike Eden.

by John Mueller

Following 9/11, Americans’ fears of terrorists-especially domestically based Islamic extremists-reached near-hysteria levels. The government and media reports stoked fears that malign actors living in the US had not only the desire but the means to wreak extreme havoc and destruction. Early reports estimated slightly more than 300 al Qaeda operatives living in the United States, and it wasn’t long before this number became 2,000 or 5,000 domestic terrorists. As these estimates snowballed, so did spending on federal counterterrorism organizations and measures, and it now totals over one trillion dollars. The federal government launched more covert operations in the name of fighting terrorist adversaries than they did in the entirety of the forty-five year Cold War. For each apprehension of a credible terrorist suspect, the US government created or re-organized two counterterrorism organizations. The scale of these efforts has been enormous, yet somehow Americans remain fearful of what they perceive to be a massive terrorist threat. But how well-founded is this fear? Is the threat of terrorism in the United States as vast as it seems and are counterterrorism efforts effective and appropriately-scaled?

In Chasing Ghosts,two of our leading critics of the mushrooming national security state show that it has not, statistically speaking, been efficient or successful-to say the least. Only one alarm in 10,000 has proven to be a legitimate threat-the rest are what John Mueller and Mark Stewart refer to as “ghosts.” These ghosts are enormous drains on resources and contribute to a countrywide paranoia that has resulted in widespread support for (and minimal critical questioning of) massive expenditures and infringements on civil liberties, including regular invasions of privacy and legally questionable imprisonments. Mueller and Stewart contend that the “ghost chase” occupying that occupies American law enforcement and fuels federal spending persists because the public has been lead to believe that the terrorism threat is significant.

As they show, it is not a significant threat-certainly not large enough to justify the vast security state apparatus that has emerged to combat it. The chance that an American will be killed by a terrorist domestically in any given year is about one in four million (under present conditions). Yet despite this statistically low risk and the extraordinary amount of resources put towards combating threats, Americans still worry and the government still spends billions. Until the true threat of domestic terrorism is understood, the country cannot begin to confront whether our pursuit of ghosts is worth the cost.